Cities as Software/Libraries as Software

Two posts that have excited me this morning:

Cities as Software, Marcus Westbury


"[Y]ou need to start by rewriting – or hacking – the software to change not what the city is but how it behaves."


Libraries as Software: Dematerialising Platforms & Returning to First Principles, 
Hugh Rundle [bold his]


"Libraries are a technology for free, large scale inter-generational transfer of knowledge and culture. ... Instead of processing, moving, accessioning and purchasing physical or digital items, librarians are better used to organise and share information and stories. Libraries run like this become creation engines.  They become more about creating and sharing a community’s ideas than providing access to the ideas of others...If we combine the ideas of Westbury with Steven Johnson’s ideas about platforms we can envisage the library as a platform for enabling innovation, learning and cultural development to occur in our communities without the need for capital.  Isn’t that a lot more compelling than a place for lending books to people?"

Pentametron

scans Twitter for tweets in iambic pentameter and combines them into non-rhyming sonnets:

What ever happened to Amanda Bynes! ?

so many people never find the one.

I am excited for tomorrow... ish

I'm never eating waffle house again...

etc.

Pentametron

Bjoern Ewers: "Instruments From Inside"

Bjoern Ewers shot these breathtaking images to promote the chamber orchestra of the Berliner Philharmoniker. They remind me of Eduardo Corral's line "asleep inside an old guitar":

More here: Bjoern Ewers: "Instruments from Inside"

On Pinterest, and "Why I Tearfully Deleted My Pinterest Inspiration Boards"

Yesterday, a colleague shared a sobering post on Pinterest written by kirsten, a lawyer and photographer at DDKPortraits: Why I Tearfully Deleted My Pinterest Inspiration Boards. I highly recommend it. After reading it, I realized I'd only ever thought about the legal gray areas when posting to Pinterest (myself in relation to the law), not whether the folks whose work I was pinning would want their stuff shared there, even with a link and a credit (myself in relation to the artists).

As an individual, I can't say that fear of legal repercussions over posting a photo on Pinterest without seeking and obtaining the creator's written permission (as an institution--a library system, for ex--I'd be more worried) has been much of a deterrent. Whether the law likes it or not, the sharing ship has sailed: things on the web that aren't hidden behind passwords or set to private will be found and shared--rapidly, frequently, frictionlessly, and often illegally. I'm one small pinner among hundreds of thousands; trying to prosecute pinners would or will be an endless unwinnable game of Whack-a-Mole. (This said, I do know of a few stories of well-intentioned bloggers using images on their sites--crediting their creators and linking to the originals--and ending up in legal disputes. It does happen. It just doesn't scare enough to deter). kirsten mentions Napster--and yes, a few small-time, "average" users got prosecuted for using Napster, but I haven't been thinking of Pinterest as Napster's close kin. It's one thing to share a song that others can download and listen to, with no real loss of quality, and another to share a small digital image of a poster or painting or piece. I see a distinction there, anyway--as does this guy, who explains why he posts his full-resolution photos online for people to "steal" and print out if they so choose, while selling limited edition prints from the same site. (His name's Trey Ratcliff, and he also wrote a post called Why Photographers Should Stop Complaining About Copyright and Embrace Pinterest). I've been seeing Pinterest--using Pinterest--as something less like Napster and more like del.icio.us: a place to store neat things I don't want to forget. I don't think del.icio.us ever raised any eyebrows when it came to copyright. When I used del.icio.us, I'd post a link to an image I wanted to remember. On Pinterest, I've posted images with links underneath them. They feel like such similar acts, to be so different!

While I may not be worried about the law, I have been committed to giving the artists I pin credit (in my fashion--and respectfully, I thought). I scrupulously track down the "original" of anything I repin on Pinterest, typing creator names and websites under every image (even when it takes *lots of work*--that is, 4 or 5 clicks). I realize this doesn't make pinning legally pure...but I did think it made it fair and okay, perhaps even positive, karma-wise. Before reading kirsten's post, it honestly hadn't occurred to me that some creators might not want their stuff shared on Pinterest, as long as credit was given. This is the paragraph that made me stop and think:

Even in light of all of the above, what finally sealed the deal for me as I tried desperately to talk myself out of deleting my gorgeous inspiration boards, was when I thought of some of the photographers whose work I had pinned from other websites. Would they want me posting their images? My initial response is probably the same as most of yours: “why not? I’m giving them credit and it’s only creating more exposure for them and I LOVE when people pin my stuff!” But then I realized, I was unilaterally making the decision FOR that other photographer. And I thought back to the thread on Facebook where the photographers were complaining about clients posting photos without their consent and I realized this rationale is no different than what those clients argue: “why can’t I post them – it’s just more exposure for you.” Bottom line is that it is not my decision to make.  Not legally and not ethically.

When I've pinned local artists' work, I've done so in the spirit of admiring them and even wanting to "help" them, thinking "I'm giving them more exposure, the exposure they deserve!" I've seen myself as pinning for the artists (voting/promoting with my pins), not against the artists. Who wouldn't want free advertising?

The comments on kirsten's post are worthwhile reading and indicate that many wouldn't. Here's a comment by artist "Valerie G" regarding Etsy and Pinterest:

Fairly recently, Etsy added a “Pin it” button to all of our shop items, without any kind of public announcement or agreement with us. I’m extremely annoyed with that, since there is no way for us to deactivate it, and I do not want my art on Pinterest at all. I have a friend who had her work pinned twice, and both times, some outside person had written a tutorial as to how to recreate her work! Yikes! You might want to check with shop owners on Etsy before pinning their work…

I don't understand "I do not want my art on Pinterest at all," but I do feel I need to (or at least should) respect it. In talking about Pinterest with others, I've heard some ask why on earth an artist would put something on the web that she didn't want shared, arguing that the whole point of the web is to share, or at least that it's naive to imagine you can post something online and keep it from being shared. I agree: it's naive, but it's not wholly unreasonable. One point of the web is to share, but there are others: to store things and to sell things. I can imagine someone only wanting his work encountered in the context of his digital storefront, where he controls what surrounds it. Context can be really important when it comes to selling things: many will happily pay four times as much for a milk glass vase they see in a carefully-curated boutique store setting than they would in a Salvation Army. Most folks will view a painting on the lawn at a yard sale differently than they will a painting hanging in a gallery, failing to erase the setting and completely focus on the piece itself. So perhaps that's what "I do not want my art on Pinterest at all" means to Valerie G? "I don't want people to encounter my painting next to an lolcat on one side and some tips for repurposing paint chips on the other"?

One of the things I like so much about kirsten's post is that it's clear that she really loves the experience of Pinterest. Pinterest is like being a kid in an eye candy store. Someone on Twitter said that Pinterest is the ultimate enabler of hoarders--it quickly makes hoarders of all of us, hoarders with infinite attic space. Ideally, Pinterest would offer a "private" option, so you could keep and visit all your pins without sharing them, like a (lovelier, brighter, more dazzling) private folder of magazine clippings...though sharing is part of the fun. I'm not sure what I'll do with my boards after reading her post: delete; say Oh, well and keep pinning; or pin far more selectively and write the creators whose work I pin for permission. But I haven't pinned anything new since I read it.

UPDATE: link to a follow-up post by kirsten written after she spoke with Ben Silberman, Pinterest's founder

OdysseyWorks: all your life's a stage (for 24 hours)

Did you ever see the 1997 movie The Game, in which a character played by Sean Penn gifts his brother, played by Michael Douglas, with a wholly immersive experience--a huge Game made just for him, tailored to every aspect of his life and personality, which includes a cast of actors he will not realize are actors, unsafe situations he will not realize are safe, something pretty much guaranteed to be a life-changing if not pleasant experience for the guy who has everything? OdysseyWorks is a group of multidisciplinary artists who create such experiences (okay, maybe not quite like those in The Game, but I was immediately reminded of it) for very small audiences...24-hour experiences, usually for a single person. Not "games," quite, but as they put it:

OdysseyWorks creates immersive, site specific, long duration performances for very small and fully participatory audiences.These multi-site, cross-genre performances radically rethink the artist-audience relationship, resulting in a series of aesthetic and narrative experiences designed for one person. Reconsidering traditional processes of art-making, performative potentials of public spaces, and the nature of human relationships, the work draws from a broad range of techniques in disciplines as ordinarily estranged as poetry and architecture, music and psychology, book arts and theater. The performances deeply and personally affect both audience and artist, incorporating community members not as passive audience members but actors, extras, and assisting artists.

I was interested to see that poet Matthea Harvey is now or has been part of the group.

Via this MetaFilter post, which also includes a link to an article describing an experience designed by Matthew Purdon and Abraham Burickson, two OdysseyWorks members, before (it appears) they took the name OdysseyWorks. A film about OdysseyWorks, The Midden of Possibility, will be showing at Cannes in May 2012. Here's the blurb from the web site:

Midden of Possibility follows conceptual performance group OdysseyWorks over the course of three months as they develop a 36hr performance for a single person--Kristina, a woman in her thirties who lives in midtown Manhattan and went through an extensive screening process to have the group make a performance for her. From New York City to Ithaca--on trains, in caves and in old farmhouses--through the pages of a novel, in a poker game (played using cards bearing archaic text and 19th century lice removal recipes), and over radio broadcasts across the Hudson River Valley,she moves through this world as the a star without a script, gradually discovering her own agency. Ready for change, and looking for a different approach to her life, Kristina has no idea what is about to happen to her. Actors are infiltrating her life, articles in the New Yorker are suddenly very personal, and everyone she knows is in on it, or seems to be. The filmmakers lived with the artists for three months as they attempted to find a way to transform their work from conventional to transcendent, and to transform themselves along the way. 

"Walking Home From the Grocery Store"

Ezra Jack Keats/Maurice Sendak mashup made with GIMP.

Quora: What is the most hauntingly beautiful song?

Quora users respond to the question, "What is the most hauntingly beautiful song?" (with lots of YouTube links for listening)

I've been haunted by Kate and Janelle's cover of Neko Case's "Star Witness" since it first saw and heard it about a month ago. I made an mp3 of it with this useful tool so I could listen to it in the car, but I know seeing them perform it has colored all my listens since, the way they look and smile at each other, check in with each other, and the way Janelle (on the right) looks off into the ceiling:



I think part of what haunts me is that I'm afraid they won't sing together forever.

Another I might choose--one that I've been listening to a lot longer--is Meredith Monk's "Gotham Lullaby":




Several folks on Quora chose Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings", which is so devastatingly beautiful I always want to bawl about 30 seconds in. But "devastating" and "haunting" are different for me, thankfully...if this came haunting me I don't think I could stand up in the morning:



How would you answer the Quora question?

Resource: the Community-Led Libraries Toolkit

Yesterday, via the Library Success wiki, I came across Working Together and their (link to pdf) Community-Led Libraries Toolkit. I'm less than a third of the way through reading the toolkit, but it's already the most valuable resource I've seen on working with diverse and socially excluded populations in libraries. I love how it acknowledges that good intentions, open minds, and talent aren't enough (aren't much at all, really) right in the beginning, and moves on from there. I'm linking it here for later reference and because I recommend even the little I've read so far (not just to library staff, but to school staff, nonprofit staff, etc). Below, some brief quotes to give the gist (bold mine):

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[on involving community members in planning] "This process is not just about offering a service or developing a collection: it is about building and strengthening the abilities of socially excluded community members to engage in the library--not just as service recipients, but as active and confident community members. Sometimes, the most important outcome of community-led service planning is not the actual products or services, but the change in socially excluded community members' sense of their importance to the library, their right to be involved, and their ability and confidence to engage...

...Overall, it is always important to keep in mind that our role in the community is not to tell community members what they need or identify the best service for their needs. You probably have creative ideas, special skills, knowledge, experience, and abilities, all of which could achieve a tangible service output immediately. However, your solution might not be the one the community would have chosen and developed if involved collaboratively, and you will have missed the opportunity for capacity and confidence building. Instead, use your expertise, skills, and knowledge to facilitate the discussion and implementation of the community's self-identified solution.

You will really have achieved the goal of inclusive service planning when socially excluded community members feel that the library is their library and that they have a voice and sense of belonging...

...Many barriers to accessing library service result from the differences between how libraries and library staff perceive the needs of socially excluded people and how socially excluded people perceive their own needs."

[on feedback-gathering methods libraries and other institutions traditionally use, like polls, comment cards, surveys]: "Traditional consultation techniques favor existing library users and/or economically-advantaged, engaged, and confident non-users."

Community-Led Libraries Toolkit